global-health
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HIEx Wants Health Startups to Escape the Pilot Trap
A good health invention can spend years waiting for a buyer. Geneva’s Health Innovation Exchange brings ministries, founders and investors together to help promising solutions reach the people they were built for.
Qure.ai Learned the Hard Part of Medical AI Isn’t Reading the Scan - It’s Getting Anyone to Act on It
The Mumbai-born company had accurate algorithms, willing pilot sites and almost no habitual users. Its climb from $113,000 in annual revenue to 45 million lives touched is a lesson in why clinical workflow - not clever code - decides whether healthcare AI matters.
Neopenda Went to an Equipment Graveyard and Built the Baby Monitor Hospitals Would Actually Use
A student project became neoGuard only after Sona Shah and Teresa Cauvel saw why donated hospital equipment was collecting dust in Uganda. Their harder lesson was that a device clinicians want is not automatically a device health systems will buy.
GSK
After spinning off toothpaste and painkillers, GSK placed a sharper bet on the immune system. Its next chapter is being written in vaccine vials, long-acting HIV medicine and a newly enlarged cancer pipeline.
Antiva Biosciences, Inc.
Antiva Biosciences is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company in South San Francisco developing topical, self-administered antiviral therapeutics for diseases caused by human papillomavirus (HPV). Its lead candidate, ABI-2280, is a vaginal tablet designed to clear high-risk HPV infection and treat pre-cancerous cervical lesions (CIN 2,3) without surgery - an approach aimed at preserving reproductive health and supporting the WHO's goal of eliminating cervical cancer.
Ophirex, Inc.
Ophirex, Inc. is a Corte Madera, California public benefit biotech company building the first genuinely new approach to snakebite in more than a century. Its lead candidate, varespladib, is a small-molecule inhibitor of sPLA2 - an enzyme found in roughly 95% of snake venoms - formulated for easy oral or injectable use so treatment can begin in minutes, in the field, rather than hours later at a distant hospital. Founded by expedition physician Matthew Lewin, the company targets a neglected killer that claims roughly 100,000 lives a year, aiming at both human and veterinary markets across the developing world and defense applications.
Zenysis Technologies
Zenysis Technologies builds data-integration and analytics software for governments and health institutions in low- and middle-income countries. Its flagship product, Harmony, is an open-source platform that pulls together fragmented health data - program records, financials, geospatial layers, surveys - into a single workspace so decision-makers can respond to disease outbreaks, run vaccination campaigns, and manage national health programs. Founded in 2016 by former UN diplomat Jonathan Stambolis, the company has deployed across roughly ten countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America and is backed by grant funders including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Gavi, and the Global Fund.
Noora Health
Noora Health is a nonprofit that treats families as an untapped part of the care team. By training patients' relatives with practical, condition-specific health skills while they wait in hospital wards - then reinforcing that training after discharge through WhatsApp, voice calls, and live chat - its Care Companion Program has reached tens of millions of caregivers across India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Nepal, cutting newborn readmissions and post-surgical cardiac complications.
PlenOptika
PlenOptika is a Cambridge, Massachusetts medical device company that makes QuickSee, a handheld autorefractor that measures a person's eyeglass prescription in about ten seconds using wavefront aberrometry and machine-learning algorithms. Spun out of the Madrid-MIT M+Vision fellowship in 2014, the company set out to close the gap on uncorrected refractive error, a problem affecting more than a billion people worldwide. Its portable, clinic-quality device has been used by vision professionals and NGOs on over 5 million patients in more than 45 countries - and even flew aboard SpaceX's Polaris Dawn mission as the first handheld autorefraction device used in space.
Untold
Untold, formerly CARE for AIDS, is an Atlanta-based faith-driven nonprofit that runs a nine-month, church-based program helping HIV-positive men and women across East and Southern Africa build a life beyond AIDS. Working through local churches with indigenous staff, its integrated model addresses physical, spiritual, emotional, and economic health at once - producing 97% viral suppression among clients and more than 50,000 program graduates.
Maternova, Inc.
Maternova is a woman-owned, woman-run social enterprise based in Providence, Rhode Island that curates, evaluates, and distributes evidence-based medical devices and diagnostics for maternal, neonatal, and reproductive health in low- and middle-income countries. Founded in 2009 as the first e-commerce marketplace for global health technologies, it connects inventors and manufacturers who lack distribution with the governments, NGOs, hospitals, and clinicians who need life-saving tools - aggregating small orders to unlock manufacturing runs and accelerate access to innovations that prevent maternal and infant deaths.
Sibel Health
Sibel Health is a Chicago-based digital health company spun out of Northwestern University that builds clinical-grade, fully wireless wearable sensors paired with AI analytics and a cloud platform. Its flagship ANNE One system continuously tracks vital signs - heart rate, respiratory rate, temperature, SpO2, pulse and more - for patients from neonates to adults, in hospitals, at home, and in low-resource settings around the world. The mission is to deliver 'Better Health Data for All.'
Tulane University
Tulane University is a private research university in New Orleans, Louisiana, founded in 1834 as the Medical College of Louisiana to fight cholera and yellow fever. Now one of 71 members of the Association of American Universities, it enrolls roughly 14,000-15,000 students across schools spanning medicine, public health and tropical medicine, law, architecture, business, science and engineering, social work and liberal arts. Known for a deep service ethic - it became the first major U.S. research university to require public service for graduation after Hurricane Katrina - Tulane pairs high-level research with a distinctive New Orleans culture.
SafetyWing
SafetyWing builds a global social safety net for remote workers, digital nomads, and distributed teams - subscription health and travel insurance that works across borders, plus benefits infrastructure for remote-first companies.